The Kill Room

reduction.
    Everything.
    Only then do you assemble, cook and finish.
    He now cleaned up quickly in Vlad Nikolov’s house, reflecting that the hour wasn’t a complete waste of time—refining your skills never is. Besides, Nikolov might have known something helpful to the police (though as it turned out, he hadn’t). Since he had people like that ADA Nance Laurel and the whistleblower to take care of, he wanted to keep Vlad Nikolov’s corpse a secret for as long as possible. He wrapped the oozing body in a dozen towels and then in garbage bags, taping them shut. He dragged the corpse to the basement, thud thud thud on the stairs, and eased it into a supply room. The odor wouldn’t begin to escape for a week or so.
    He then used the man’s mobile and called Elite Limousines, reporting in hesitant English with a functional Slavic accent that he was Vlad Nikolov’s cousin. The driver had learned of a death in the family, back in the old country (he didn’t mention Moscow or Kiev or Tbilisi, since he didn’t know). Vlad was taking several weeks off. The receptionist protested—only about scheduling, not that the story seemed incredible—but he’d hung up.
    Swann surveyed the scene of the interrogation and noted he’d left very little evidence. He’d used trash bags and towels to catch the blood. He now scrubbed the rest, using bleach, and put the towels and phone in a trash bag, which he’d take with him for disposal in a Dumpster on his way home.
    As he was about to leave, he received an encrypted email. Well, it seemed that NIOS had learned some very interesting information. The whistleblower was still unknown, though Metzger had people looking into that. However, the tech department had discovered some names of other people involved in the case, in addition to Ms. Nance Laurel, the prosecutor. The lead investigators were two individuals—an NYPD detective named Amelia Sachs and a consultant, someone with the curious name Lincoln Rhyme.
    It was time for some more digging and datamining, Swann reflected, pulling out his phone. After all, the strength of the best cookbook in the world, The Joy of Cooking , derived from the patient assembly and organization of facts, from knowledge , in short—not showy recipes.

CHAPTER 19
    D O YOU KNOW ABOUT PANAMA? ” Tash Farada asked Sachs, in the passenger seat of the Town Car. He was animated and seemed to enjoy speeding through traffic as they headed toward Wall Street.
    She said, “The canal. Some invasion or something down there. A while ago.”
    The driver laughed and accelerated hard to avoid a slow-moving lane of traffic on the FDR. “Some ‘invasion or something.’ Yes, yes. I read history a great deal. I enjoy it. In the eighties Panama had a regime change. A revolution. Just like our country.”
    “Yes, Iran. In ’seventy-nine, wasn’t it?”
    He glanced at her with a frown.
    “Persia, I mean,” she corrected.
    “No, I’m speaking of seventeen seventy-six. I’m American.”
    Oh. Our country.
    “Sorry.”
    A wrinkle of brow but a forgiving one. “Now, Panama. Noriega used to be an ally of America. Fighting the Communist evil. Helping the CIA and the DEA wage war on the scourge of drugs…Of course, he was also helping the cartel heads wage war on the scourge of the CIA and the DEA. That game caught up with him and in nineteen eighty-nine the U.S. had had enough. We invaded. The problem was that Panama was a dirty little war. You’ve read George Orwell?”
    “No.” Sachs might have, long ago, but she never bluffed or tried to impress with knowledge she didn’t have command of.
    “In Animal Farm , Orwell wrote, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Well, all wars are bad. But some wars are more bad than others. The head of Panama was corrupt, his underlings were corrupt. They were dangerous men and oppressed the people. But the invasion was very hard too. Very violent. Roberto Moreno was living there, in the capital, with his mother and father.”
    Sachs recalled her conversation with Fred Dellray, who’d told them that Robert Moreno also went by Roberto. She wondered if he’d legally changed it or just used the Latino version as a pseudonym.
    “Now, he was a young teenager. That day in the car he told Lydia, his voluptuous friend, that he didn’t have the happiest home life, his father traveling, his mother had sadness problems. She was not much there for him.”
    Sachs remembered too the father’s